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05 January 2014

Humanities scholarship is incredibly relevant

Natalia Cecire gives a roaring defense of the humanities - one to which I would love to see the usual suspects actually respond (not that they will). She observes:

The humanities are often represented as an irrelevant, moribund, and merely preservationist field, passing on old knowledge of old things without producing anything new. That's why it keeps having to be "defended" by people saying, "no! old shit matters too!"

The reality, however, is more complicated than that pictures suggests:-

Do you know a black child who grew up knowing about America’s great traditions in African American literature, visual art, music, and film? Are you glad Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cane are in print? Then thank the scholars, artists, and activists who have recovered that work—often obscured by a racist publishing culture and by an academy that didn’t think it was important at the time. There’s a reason that students protested and sat in to fight for the establishment of ethnic studies and women’s studies departments in the 1960s and 70s. It wasn’t a fashion statement: serious formal engagement with the cultural contributions of women and ethnic minorities was urgently needed. No one can credibly say in public that women cannot be great authors anymore, for example, and when the writer V.S. Naipaul tried in 2011 (and David Gilmour in 2013), everybody knew how ridiculously wrong he was. How did they know? Thank the humanities. Thank those horrible feminist critics from the '80s who allegedly ruined literary scholarship. They worked like hell to change the language, and most of them never got famous.

It is obvious, of course, that some cranky and usually male academics did everything they could to prevent the very positive cultural changes prompted by research, curiosity, and resistance in the humanities. But the point is that there are very few cultural changes that have transpired - ever - that don't fundamentally represent a collision between humanistic ways of knowing. While many, and often those working in the biological and psychological sciences, for instance, were proclaiming the fixity of human nature, humanists and lovers of the humanities demonstrated that human nature was either plastic or non-existent. And that's just one example for your Sunday reading.